Letter to the editor: Details of major traumatic events are seared into our memories

I would like to respond to Jessica Lockhart’s letter referring to her memory of being traumatically sexually assaulted as a teenager by a teenage boy (Oct. 2). Memory of trauma is very different from memory of daily life.

Ask me how my day went on May 22, 1967, and I can only guess. Ask me about May 24, 1967, and I can remember in detail what it was like to “come to” lying in the back seat of a car in a freshly plowed cornfield.

After gently removing the dirt from my eyes, I looked up to see chunks of shattered safety glass hanging in the rear window of the car over my head. My right leg was bent at mid-thigh and draped over my left leg, despite feeling like it was straight out in front of me. The ambulance was already there, and they put my broken leg in a zippered cast that they inflated so they could get me out of the car and into the ambulance.

I felt the difference in the pain as I traveled in the ambulance through a plowed cornfield, then along a gravel driveway to the pavement of a country road. Fifty-one years have not removed a single detail of my memory of that night.

I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

Joyce E. Leslie

Peaks Island

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